by Dan Poblocki
The central mythology of the stone children was similar to many of the Judeo-Christian beliefs Nathaniel was familiar with—but there were also quite a few differences. According to the text he had found, some people believed that God created the world in seven days. When He was done, there existed a place called Eden—an enormous garden surrounded by a tall circular wall that protected the paradise from the yet unforged, darker realms. On either side of an ornate entrance stood two statues. Two stone children. One boy and one girl. The pedestals on which the children perched were intricately decorated with signs and symbols of the creatures who were to be kept out of paradise. Each child held a large blank book, marked by one of two Hebrew letters carved onto its cover—Yod on one book; Chet on the other.
Together the letters spelled the Hebrew word Chai, which roughly translated to the English word life.
“Maggie was right,” said Eddie aloud. Then the weight of his realization descended upon him. A stone child. Holding a large blank book. Marked by one of the Hebrew letters: Chet. Life, inside these walls… Was that what the symbols meant? Eddie wondered.
If Life was contained inside, then what had God left outside of the Garden? Was The Enigmatic Manuscript implying what he thought?
Eddie continued to read.
The gate where the stone children stood was guarded by an archangel whose job was to act as the Voice of God. He held the key to the Garden and watched it carefully. Whenever any creature was refused passage into the Garden, the archangel used the key to carve its image into the stone pedestals as a record of its depravity. The symbols illustrating the stone gate served as a reminder of which creatures were doomed to exile.
Eddie looked up, his heart thumping, his mouth dry. He put down the book and stood up. His head was spinning. He wanted to call Harris and tell him about everything he’d just read. The statue in the woods … she must be one of these stone children! The thought seemed incredible, but then again, so did everything that had happened to him in the past month. All the secrets, the codes, and especially the monsters, seemed like impossibilities from one of Nathaniel’s stories, but Eddie now knew they were not fiction.
Compelled by curiosity, Eddie continued to read.
Beyond the stone children at the gate, inside the Garden, God had created the first man and woman. Throughout history, most people have understood these to be Adam and Eve, but according to The Myth of the Stone Children, Eve was not the first woman. Before Eve ever existed, Adam had a wife named Lilith. Unlike Eve, Lilith did not come from a piece of his rib. Lilith was Adam’s other half, his equal. She and Adam lived together in Eden for quite some time. Like every married couple, they fought. One day, they fought so terribly that God came and asked them what was wrong. In haste, Adam answered that Lilith had wronged him and should be punished. God took him at his word and banished Lilith from the Garden. He sent her far away, to a place where the Garden’s light did not reach.
Lilith’s only companions in her new home were the Exiled—the most vile, wretched creatures in their world. Lilith’s children were their children. These children became known as the Lilim; they too were Exiles.
According to the legend Nathaniel had found, after the infamous incident with the serpent and the tree of knowledge, God smashed Eden’s wall into thousands of pieces and scattered them far across the globe. Where the pieces fell, the fabric of our world became weak. Sometimes the fabric was so thin, people could see through it into darker realms bordering our own. Having traveled to these places for inspiration, for advice, and for prayer, humans learned the sites of the fallen wall were sacred, but also dangerous. When glancing into other worlds, they never knew who might be glancing back. According to The Myth of the Stone Children, Lilith’s children were tired of living in darkness. Some wanted to live in the light of our world. Others only wanted to destroy it. The Lilim were unsatisfied looking through the veil. They wanted more. They wanted a door.
As he studied, Nathaniel learned that several hundred years ago, a scholar familiar with the mythology discovered a strange instrument, which he believed was the archangel’s key. The instrument was a necklace from which dangled a sharp silver pendant. From his studies, he concluded that this key could lead whoever possessed it to the places where the walls of Eden had tumbled. It was also the scholar’s opinion that this instrument, if used correctly, had the power to puncture a hole in the fabric between the worlds.
The lamp on Eddie’s bedside table flickered and dimmed. He dropped his pen with a shout. “What the heck?” Eddie whispered to himself, scrambling to the center of the mattress in case he was suddenly thrown into darkness. He turned and stared at the lamp for a few seconds. The light remained defiantly faint.
For a moment, he tried to convince his wild imagination that it was a perfectly normal occurrence, a power surge of some sort, but after the creepy experiences of the past few days, he understood quickly that it might be something less ordinary. It was not a pleasant thought.
He imagined a sharp-clawed hand, reaching up from the side of the bed, tugging on his quilt. “Stop it,” he whispered, smacking his forehead with the palm of his hand. He then called “Mom!” toward his closed bedroom door. He waited for several quiet seconds, but she did not answer. “Dad!” he tried, but he was met again only by the subtle creaking of the house as the breeze came up the hill.
Where are they? he thought. He looked at the clock, wondering if they might be asleep. It flashed twelve o’clock repeatedly. Maybe there had been an electrical shortage, after all.
Eddie realized he had no idea how long he’d been working. He pulled aside his curtain and peeked out the window. Gatesweed was quiet at the bottom of the hill—most of the lights in the few inhabited houses were out. It must be later than he thought.
As he was about to shut the curtain, Eddie noticed something strange happening in the center of town. It started with the park lights in the town green suddenly, collectively hushing out. Eddie watched as the streetlights on Center Street blinked out too. With each passing second, another circle of streetlights turned off. Then the buildings in between each concentric street seemed to lose power as well. Eddie had never seen anything like this before—during a normal power outage, all the electricity went out at once. But the darkness at the bottom of the hill seemed to be creeping toward him, like a disease.
The light on his bedside table dimmed even further, and Eddie groaned.
Unable to control himself, he leapt into the middle of his bedroom floor, clearing at least an arm’s length between where he landed and the dark space under his bed. Then he raced toward his bedroom door and yanked it open. The pitch-dark upstairs hallway stretched before him. Eddie paused and turned around. The thing with claws he imagined waiting for him underneath his mattress might still be there, but Eddie did not yet run. The darkness in the hallway seemed just as threatening.
As he stood in his doorway contemplating whether or not to peer under his bed, the light on his nightstand simply sputtered out. Darkness weighed upon the house like a musty quilt. Eddie’s throat felt like it was closing up, but he managed to call down the hallway for his parents. Again, they seemed not to hear him; he didn’t receive an answer. Eddie wondered if they were even in the house at all. Where else would they be at such a late hour?
Eddie began to feel claustrophobic. He could barely see—the hallway was more like a vague impression than the real thing. He stepped farther into the hallway, clutched at the cold glass doorknob, and swung the door shut.
Searching for the nearest light switch, he swiped at the wall. He found it, but when he flicked the switch, nothing happened. Eddie exhaled slowly, trying to compose himself. Next, he took a purposeful step toward his parents’ bedroom. Keeping his eyes straight forward, Eddie managed to make his way there. While terrified by the silence filling the house, he was also thankful that nothing was growling, whispering, or scratching from inside the walls—as so often happened in Nathaniel Olmstead’s books during moments lik
e this.
He knocked at his parents’ bedroom door but didn’t wait for a response before turning the knob and swinging the door open. “Hello?” he said, stepping forward into the room. He heard the sheets rustling. Thank goodness, Eddie thought, scrambling quickly across the floor to his mother’s side of the bed. “It must be later than I thought,” he said quietly.
He reached out to touch her. He knew she wouldn’t mind him waking her—he’d done it before when he’d had a nightmare. He could feel her shoulder underneath the down comforter, but she didn’t respond, not even when he shook her slightly. “Mom!” he whispered.
Finally, she groaned in her sleep, then mumbled something. It sounded like, “What’s the matter?”
Eddie thought about how to respond without sounding paranoid. Any rational person could explain away his fears within seconds. The power’s gone out. Go back to bed. But Eddie didn’t want to go back to bed by himself—not after everything he’d learned from reading The Enigmatic Manuscript.
There was nearly a half-foot of space at the edge of the bed, so Eddie lay there, on top of the blanket. I’ll just stay until the power comes back on, he thought.
He smelled his mother’s fruity shampoo, but quickly the scent changed. It was no longer sweet, like his mother, but it was horrible—vaguely familiar, like something he’d experienced in a nightmare. He remembered the odor from Nathaniel Olmstead’s basement, when he and Harris had been reading The Wish of the Woman in Black. Where was it coming from? Eddie sat up, holding his nose. He listened to his parents’ breathing beside him. Sleeping soundly, they seemed not to notice the stench.
Eddie couldn’t stomach it; the smell was making him sick.
Reaching out toward his mother, he touched what he thought was her hair sprawled across the pillow. But the feel of it was unlike his mother’s long curls. His fingers clutched at what felt like cobwebs—thin, sticky strands that clung to his hand as he pulled away in horror. “Mom!” Eddie screamed. But instead of sitting up suddenly, his parents continued to lie in bed. His father even started to snore. “Wake up!” he said. He drew his hand away, as what he thought had been his mother finally turned over to look at him.
It was a shape blacker than the shadows that rose from the bed and towered over Eddie, who continued to lie on the mattress frozen in terror.
He knew who she was. Impossible as it seemed, he’d seen her staring at him from the wood grains in the library table that afternoon. Eddie thought he might puke.
Her weathered face, so white it was almost green, hovered near the ceiling and glimmered in the darkness like an alien moon. Her skin was chapped, transparent, like wet paper. Her tattered, malignant hair hung from her head like rotting seaweed—long, ragged, and blacker than the deepest part of the ocean. Her eyes were dark empty holes, and her lipless mouth gaped like a fish. Heavy black robes stretched away from her body like shadows being pulled away from the walls. As she moved forward, she clenched her hands in front of herself. Her face tightened as she seemed to squint at him.
Eddie wiped a tickle at the back of his collar. Sweat.
Wake up, she said in a mimicking, high-pitched voice. Wake up, she repeated. Wake up. Then she started to laugh—a dark din totally unlike the voice she’d just used to taunt him. The sound hurt his ears. Her robes lifted and swirled around her as she reached toward him. The woman’s hair whipped at her face. Her black eyes expanded until they were all he knew.
He was falling into them. He couldn’t stop. There was nothing to hold on to. Nothing but darkness and the sound of laughter and the rush of—
Thump!
Eddie fell off the bed and hit the ground. He scrambled backward and toppled his mother’s bedside table. Her lamp turned over and crashed to the floor. Eddie leapt to his feet, suddenly furious. “What did you do with my parents?” he shouted at the woman, remembering the book in which Dylan finds two soggy piles of pajamas on the living room floor. If he stuck around for much longer, he knew he’d end up just like that. She reached toward him, but Eddie ducked. He managed to run to the end of the bed and around the corner of the bedpost, where he had a straight shot for the door. But halfway across the room, he slipped on the rug. As he struggled to stand, he felt a chill run up his spine. The Woman stood inches behind him, her face nearly a foot over his own. Before he had a chance to scream, she seemed to smile. A horrible, humorless, manipulative smile, but a smile nonetheless.
Eddie …, her voice purred—deeply, vibrantly. It reminded him of the soft string-quartet music his parents sometimes played on the stereo during dinner. Why do you want to hurt me?
“I … I don’t want to hurt you,” he heard himself say. He looked at his hands; for some reason, he wasn’t melting.
Good boy …, she continued. Stay away from things which do not concern you. … Put that book back on the shelf. … Her hair reminded him of plant tendrils floating in underwater currents. Read something else instead, she continued. Something … happier. Prettier. Less … frightening.
Eddie didn’t know what to say. “I … I …,” was all that came out of his mouth when he tried to speak.
Unless you like being frightened …, she whispered. Do you? Her eye sockets widened. She waited for his answer, as if she were truly curious, or almost amused. Do you like being scared, Eddie? Because scary is something I am quite good at. … I have had many years of experience. …
Her face was no longer a face. It was a long hallway in a secret, underground place through which he found himself hurtling, his feet skidding against the slick, dark floor. At the end of the hallway, twenty feet away, a swarm of black insects so dense it seemed to fold in upon itself beckoned to him like a hand. He reached for the walls, trying to find something to hold on to, but his fingers kept slipping against the wet stone. He clenched his mouth shut, trying to keep his screams in and the insects out.
Eddie turned and to his surprise found he was still standing in his parents’ bedroom. He grabbed at the doorknob, wrenching it open and running blindly into the hallway. When he reached the top of the stairs, he grabbed the handrail and swung himself around the corner. Taking three steps at a time, he leapt down the staircase, until he missed one and slid the rest of the way to the rug in the foyer.
Someone clutched at his shoulders, shaking him.
His father was leaning over him. “Edgar! Are you okay?”
Eddie glanced around, unsure of where he was or what was happening. As he tried to sit up at the bottom of the stairs, a dull pain throbbed in his tailbone. He groaned.
“What’s wrong?” asked Mom. Eddie turned to find her peering up from her place at the kitchen table. She appeared to still be writing, as if she hadn’t moved since Eddie had come home from school.
“He fell down the stairs,” said Dad. “I saw the whole thing from the couch in the living room.”
Eddie stood up. His parents both seemed so calm. He nearly grabbed his father to give him a hug but stopped himself. He didn’t want to alarm them by being upset. “When did the power come back on?” said Eddie evenly. He held on to the banister at the bottom of the stairs to keep his hands from shaking. His parents were looking at him funny.
“The power’s been on all night,” said Dad. He felt Eddie’s forehead with the back of his hand. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Eddie wasn’t sure of the answer to that question. He turned around and looked up the stairs. He could see the light spilling from his bedroom. “But the lights were …” Eddie peered out the window next to the front door. The entire town was lit up as usual. Had the whole thing been a dream? Impossible. Eddie was certain that he’d been awake the whole time. He’d been too excited by Nathaniel’s story to fall asleep. “What—what time is it?” he said.
“Nearly midnight,” said Mom. “We thought you were asleep upstairs.”
“You mean you’ve been down here the entire time? But I thought you were … I thought you were …” Eddie tried to speak, but he realized he didn’t want to f
inish his sentence.
Plus, at this point, he wasn’t sure what he had been thinking.
15
Eddie was late for school the next morning.
In class, Ms. Phelps called on him for the third time in twenty minutes, and he had to admit, once again, he didn’t know the answer. He hadn’t done any of the homework. He didn’t blame Ms. Phelps for being upset—how could she possibly know that last night he had been haunted by a malicious spirit who once upon a time might have been banished from the Garden of Eden, and who might have been responsible for the disappearance of Nathaniel Olmstead? Of course, he didn’t try to explain this. He knew she wouldn’t understand. He would save his explanations until he met up with Harris and Maggie during lunch.
After class, Eddie found them sitting near the windows in the far corner of the cafeteria. He was late because he’d wanted to make photocopies of his translation so they could read it themselves. He’d convinced Mr. Lyons to help him by volunteering to reshelf books next week—if he was still alive. …
Neither Harris nor Maggie looked like they had slept much, but when they saw him approaching, they perked up. He knew they’d be excited to hear about his translation, but he didn’t know how to explain everything else that had happened.
After falling down the stairs, Eddie refused to sleep in his own bedroom. Even shoved between his parents, Eddie’s mind had churned with frightening images all night long. He hadn’t slept either.
He slumped into the chair next to Harris and across from Maggie.
“So?” said Harris, taking a bite of his peanut butter sandwich. “How did it go? Do you know what happened to Nathaniel Olmstead?”
Eddie shook his head. “I didn’t finish.”
“Didn’t finish?” said Maggie. “Why not?”
